Girl in the Woods

by Aspen Matis

  Her assessment was that I had poor judgment, and my rape had immediately confirmed it. I believed that the rape had erased all of the progress I’d made in my time hiking and proved my mother right. Immediately. I was hurting with not only the shame of the rape, but also the shame of feeling I’d wanted to prove myself a valid, independent person—but I couldn’t.

  I told her only, “I said, ‘Slow down’ and then, ‘Stop it.’ I was frozen.” I left out the marijuana. I left out the titty-fuck.

  She was absolutely silent as I spoke. I imagined her in our Newton home. She was sixty-two, still agile, hair now mourning dove gray. I waited through a muteness. I worried learning her baby daughter was raped had startled her. I worried it had killed her. Slow moments passed. But then she spoke.

  “You need to speak about this with a counselor,” she said flatly. “My mother knows a psychologist who’s on Weber Street.” She told me she would find the information for me immediately.

  Immediately—now I remained quiet through the line.

  “Debby?”

  “That isn’t necessary.” I said, “I’ve already spoken to someone at school.”

  Her tone changed, I sensed it in her breathing: inaudible, as usual—lighter. I waited for her to say something more. I didn’t want her practical support, I wanted comfort. At last she spoke again. “Did you have a good dinner?”

  I felt I’d just been slapped. I quickly shut my phone.

  I couldn’t believe her strange irrelevant question. I wished I hadn’t told her. I wished I could go back in time and decide not to. The air in my room tasted rancid, of damp dirty socks and old dried period blood. But I wasn’t on my period. I couldn’t breathe this air. My phone lit up—MOM—but I didn’t answer. I had to go outside, get out, right away.

  I wandered up the block to the Conoco convenience store and bought a one-pound bag of Jolly Ranchers, the pink watermelon kind, and chain-popped them as I walked to the river. It was sleek and black, carving gracefully north to Denver. I imagined not stopping, just stepping north, reaching all the way to Denver, sleeping whenever I got tired, in the river’s silent bushes, hidden, unmonitored—the insanity and liberation in that. White aspens and the yellow dirt path falling: swallowed up by night.

  I had expected my mother to be sad, hurt—devastated. This wooden reaction was not what I was expecting at all. Her stiffness hurt. It shocked me as much as my rape had.

  I thought of my brother Jacob, wanted his advice.

  Going into my first year of middle school, awkward and terrified, I’d asked Jacob what would happen if no one liked me; he’d told me to sign up for lots of clubs, to try new things and try to learn as much as I could. When I’d been nervous the new school would be too hard for me, Jacob had assured me: I’d been one of the smartest kids at Bowen Elementary, and I’d be one of the smartest kids at Oak Hill, too. It would be the same kids. I would be okay.

  That made good sense to me. I took great comfort in this. Jacob was right. I could trust my brother.

  Now Jacob would know what to do.

  Four weeks after the rape, Jacob flew out to Colorado Springs; I couldn’t wait to finally see him. We’d had a fight the last time we’d talked, and I was nervous—the air between us had felt cold—but I hoped we could move past it now. I needed him. I hadn’t told him about what happened my second night at school. He remained happily ignorant. And I knew that truly he’d come out to Colorado not for me but to campaign for Obama—it was late September 2008, and Colorado was a swing state—and autumn was Jacob’s off-season, after the baseball year had ended, before the beginning of spring training in February. But I believed maybe he’d chosen Colorado Springs because I was there.

  I planned how I would tell him—in my grandparents’ old baby blue Cadillac, on a long drive through golden, trembling aspens, up in mountains the color of morning sky. I’d tell him: some bad news. Very bad news. He’d listen, and wind would rustle the aspens, their bark impossibly white, and the season’s first snow would slip down, gracefully like a car spinning off on ice and into a soft snowbank. Bright flakes would pile in long mounds on the colorless aspen branches. The roads of frozen yellow dirt crisscrossing outward in a wild, infinite system of ways to go.

  I’d imagined he’d listen, saddened, heartbroken, and say, “I’m sorry. I love you. This doesn’t change a thing.” He’d squeeze my shoulder and rub my back, and we’d sit in silence, in comfort in the still car’s heat, snowflakes gliding in the wind. My big brother would make me feel protected again.

  It didn’t happen like that. He’d arrived while I was away, backpacking in Canyonlands, Utah, with a small pack of freshmen on an Outdoor Recreation Club orientation trip. He stayed at my grandparents’ ranch house, three miles off campus, his first couple of nights and then, the night I got back, he met me on the green. I was carrying my backpack, all my stuff dusty with desert dirt. He hugged me and I held him. He was here to campaign for Obama. I needed him here, for me. I was safer knowing he was here. For a moment on the green, dusty and exhausted under the yellow walkway lamps, I felt better, good, like things were on the upswing, like Jacob could fix things.

  I did tell him in the baby blue Cadillac. We were not in aspens, but on the Colorado College campus. We were talking about where to get dinner—José Muldoon’s Tex-Mex or just sandwiches. He did listen, quiet. We were parked on the southern edge of the campus, near my freshman dormitory. An ambulance’s lights were spinning red and bright blue in the distance, a far-off catastrophe. We sat isolated from it, in the car, the heat humming, not hearing the siren or knowing or caring all too much about whoever out there needed help.

  “Can I tell you something?” I’d said, knowing already that I’d started wrong; my tone was casual, creating dissonance. Jacob had seemed irritated tonight, hungry, and we’d been talking about nothing substantial. I already regretted starting now, this way. Though I couldn’t unspeak.

  He waited. “Yeah?”

  “I got raped on my second night at school,” I said fast, so fast I was unsure he would hear it.

  “Like,” he said, his face tinted red, then blue, then red, silently changing in the ambulance’s far light. “Like, how?”

  My eyes watered. I didn’t know the right thing to say, now.

  “I’m sorry,” my brother said, “but how did that happen?”

  I didn’t want to tell the story. I didn’t know how to tell the story.

  Jacob asked me if I’d kicked him. I whispered, “No.” I was crying, though I didn’t know if my brother saw. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking out the windshield, toward the darkness, maybe at the ambulance, which was still there, lights spinning on, taking too long.

  “Did you even scream?” he asked. He couldn’t understand how it had happened, how I had let it happen, how someone could rape me, how I could be alone with someone who would rape me.

  I was silent. I felt I’d just been erased, whited out like an embarrassing typo, my mouth filling with snow.

  Then, he asked, “Do you want me to beat him up for you?”

  All I said to that, all I could say, was “No.”

  I hardly saw Jacob for the rest of his six-week stay in Colorado Springs. He was very busy, but he tried to make time for me. I tried to avoid him. I was still angry—I hated that he’d made me feel I had to defend myself when I told him about my rape. But before he left, we took a nighttime walk around Colorado College’s campus.

  Strolling the green beside him, I felt frumpy and fat—I felt almost apologetic about my appearance. My hair was a tangled brown mess of curls, and I was wearing the same sweatpants I’d had on for days, maybe a week. I confessed to him—I’d felt unattractive since middle school. I told him I was now absolutely ugly, since the rape.

  He told me I had to be blind. “Debby, you were a cute kid,” he said. He told me his girlfriend had seen a picture of me from when I was a little girl and commented how pretty I was. “You look the same now.”

  I squ
inted at my brother. I’d never worn makeup, always wore glasses. High school boys at Newton South had never seen me. They weren’t sweet to me. They didn’t treat me special, hold doors or pick up my dropped pencils like they did for the more popular—prettier—girls. I told him, “I’ve actually always been ugly.”

  Jacob told me I was simply wrong. “You’re just not pulling out any of the stops.”

  The “stops,” apparently, were getting contact lenses, a better haircut, and maybe mascara or something like that. “What girls wear,” he said. “Like lipstick.”

  “Like lipstick,” I repeated. I had done that.

  That I could do.

  But I couldn’t put contacts in. I could not do it. No one would get to see what Jacob saw: that, secretly, I was pretty. It was something only Jacob knew, and he told me, and I heard and smiled but didn’t yet believe that it was true.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  He was sweet and affirming. I remained cold.

  I said that he looked different now—he looked shorter to me.

  He had wanted to be the bigger person, and, in my hurting, in bitterness I’d cut him smaller.

  For the rest of his six-week stay in Colorado Springs, Jacob slept at my grandparents’, in my mother’s childhood bedroom. He became a manager at Obama’s Manitou Springs headquarters. I hardly saw him, just two more times. He was very busy.

  When Obama won, Jacob had his own party to go to—one for his campaigners. I wasn’t invited. Then he left and drove back east. He would play professional baseball that summer under bright lights before exhilarating crowds. I wouldn’t go to any of his games.

  They allowed Junior to stay on campus. Then, just weeks after he had been found innocent, the college removed him from his room in the other big dorm on the other side of campus—they didn’t explain why—and moved him into my dorm, a single on the floor above me. On the stairs I sometimes saw him. I passed him in the hall; he lived next door to Katherine, who had become my only friend. I saw him on my way out to class, at breakfast or in the middle of the day when I came home to put down my class stuff and lie down. He never seemed to notice me.

  The college’s rape counselor helped me to find new housing. I had an “immediate need.” Campus Housing called me. “There’s no singles in the dorms left,” said a husky alto voice. I could choose between a forced triple—three girls in a double—or a room of my own off campus, farther from him.

  I said, “The one farther away, I think.”

  She said, “Great! That’s good. Okay.” Then she hung up.

  And so Junior remained on campus, in my building. I dumped the contents of my dressers into heavy-duty trash bags, stuffed my dresses like garbage into the bags, hangers and all. I was promptly relocated into the Colorado College Inn, an off-campus “space” for students who got bad numbers in the housing lottery—or kids who got not-so-bad numbers but really, really wanted to be alone. Students had named it the Cinder-block Palace. I hauled my trash bags one by one to my new room by myself. By bag three, halfway between the two rooms, my arms were trembling. I dragged it for a minute more and stopped, sat down on the wide sidewalk with my stretch-marked garbage bag. I was wearing sweatpants I hadn’t washed in months, a stained yellow sweatshirt that said Colonials—my big brother’s old college baseball team—in faded cursive letters.

  Moving in my belongings, I saw few people in the hallway, not one single girl. A boy, here and there. Near-all the rooms in this building, it turned out, contained young men. My neighbor, a skinny hermit, had fake blood smeared across his hallway window. I hoped I’d never see him.

  My new room was my cave among strange stranger-students’ caves: all shadowed and dank, a motel for hiding in darkness. White paint peeled off the wooden toilet lid and exposed bleached naked wood; the paint that still clung to the lid cracked and separated from the wood and rippled, bile yellow near the crack edges. I felt as yellow as this place, as fucked, as sad.

  The bedroom was carpeted with short gray-blue loops of the roughest weave—part plastic—sealed to the cinder-block walls with a black-tar rubber. I would lie on my back in the narrow bed and stare for hours at the blank ceiling, the whitewashed cinder-block walls, thinking about why I was here, why I’d been moved to the CC Inn. I felt banished, punished for what he’d done. I’d been tricked—this horrid place was, in fact, not even far from my old dorm. It was just across the street, behind the Conoco gas station, always in the shade. It didn’t feel safer. It didn’t feel safer at all.

  I lay there, angry and scared, realizing finally that my school would not help me. The rape counselor didn’t. My parents couldn’t. I had to help myself. I had to leave this place.

  More than anything, I thought about my mommy. I felt she abandoned me.

  In my lightless room I dialed the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network’s hotline. The line rang; a nameless woman quickly answered. The hotline was anonymous, the voice could have been any woman anywhere; I could have been anybody, too. She wouldn’t know. So I told her about the weed, my momentary attraction to Junior, his thick pink fingers, the titty-fuck thing—everything. I confessed: before he’d raped me, I’d liked him.

  My heart revved as I said it. My judgment must be awful, she would think. My mother was right; I had bad judgment. I had told him he could titty-fuck me; everywhere above my pink short shorts, he could kiss me. How could I have wanted that? How could I have trusted a rapist? Somehow I had. I used the woman on the hotline like a priest.

  She stayed on the line with me for hours as I spoke, listening; she whispered, “I’m here,” as I cried. Her invisible presence softened the hard pain that gripped my stomach. She told me that my rape was not my fault, that I should feel no shame, that—simple as it may sound—I hadn’t caused it. No one causes rape but rapists. No one causes rape but rapists. No one causes rape but rapists. It was true. And it had not been obvious to me. And hearing it from someone else, a professional, someone who should know, helped me believe that soon I would believe it.

  My shoulder blades unclenched. I felt like it was night and I was lost, but I at last had a path out of the woods, and dawn was going to break. It always did.

  It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fault, it was not my fault.

  The spring semester began; I enrolled in new courses. It was a fresh semester, a new year. Soon I would turn nineteen. I would try to have a party. People would begin to notice me.

  My classes were exactly the subjects I’d wanted. They sounded interesting; lucky me. Things weren’t so awful. I tried hard to feel grateful and relieved. I was lucky. I was back at school, free; I was okay. I was.

  My tasks were manageable, miniscule: study cool things with smart people; pass the exams. Each morning, brush your teeth; repeat each night. Remember to eat. Sleep when you’re sleepy. I went to my class each morning, punctual, prepared for discussions. I read my readings, watched the required films. It was regimented and very clear; it was easy.

  I would call my mom and tell her how well I was doing, how I was in control, handling things.

  She would act happy, but her questions would always make me feel out of control. She would tell me how I should budget my time to finish my work on time.

  The season warmed and frost-gemmed walls slowly thawed: dulled by winter’s old dirt. I tried to act cheerful. I felt only exhausted, numb.

  The spring brightened like a Technicolor fever and I dutifully studied for Film Theory, but by then I hated class. The films and critics’ essays didn’t captivate me. The clinical white walls of my dorm depressed me. I could watch the films in my room on my lit laptop, but I couldn’t escape into them. I needed different stories. I needed stories of escape.

  I flicked my pocketknife open. My dad had given it to me when I turned ten; I’d been a Girl Scout then. The blade was dirty, gunked with gray stickiness, though I hardly used it. I knelt; the walls of my room were at once purely white and very dim. I cut open the dented box of books I’d broug
ht from home, labeled “Debby’s Books—Personal.” It was filled with the adventure books my mommy had once read me. Then I noticed, shoved in a back corner of the box, a cracked, brown spine marked Travels in Alaska.

  My breathing stilled as I picked it up in my dark dorm room, so far from the life I imagined when I found this book, from the freedom I’d felt on Muir’s trail only months ago. I looked out my window and saw the Conoco gas station that blocked my sight of the trees. There was no trace of nature around me. I’d come to this college hoping to be close to the wilderness, close to my favorite camping grounds, close to my happiest memories, and I had none of it now.

  I reopened Travels in Alaska.

  I was so comforted and hopeful, having it in my hands again, and I reread it with a headlamp through the night. He wrote, “Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill.”

  Dawn broke. That next day I felt better, hopeful and entirely safer. I remembered family hikes on trails through aspen forests, along high ridges, down to valley-lakes. The trails were veins, the mountainscape a body infinitely beautiful and novel. My family was harmonious in the woods. I longed to return to them, to then. My wild little tribe.

  That morning, giddy, having just finished rereading the old copy of Travels in Alaska, I called my father. I told him that I’d taken the book. I asked him where it had come from, what it’d meant to him and Mom. Maybe years ago, when they’d picked up this book, they would’ve understood my longing to walk into the wilderness.

  He said: “You have it?” He repeated back to me: “By Muir?” Then he said he’d never read it, hadn’t known they’d had it. He’d never even heard of it.

  I had been called to adventure since childhood, always; I heard the call. I thought back to the freedom of my summer—my happiness, alone in mountains.

  Muir promised: “In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.”